Peter O’Mahony 'at peace' with retirement call

AT PEACE WITH RETIREMENT: Peter O'Mahony is at peace with his decision to retire. Pic: David Rogers/Getty Images

Throw an eye over the vast landscape of Peter O’Mahony’s career now, in the wake of the news that his playing days are coming to an end, and it’s all too easy to puff out the cheeks at the sheer majesty of it all and reason that this was always destined to happen.

The long goodbye will kick into gear on Saturday week when France come to town and O’Mahony, along with Cian Healy and Conor Murray, suits up for an Ireland game at the Aviva Stadium one last time as a member of the playing squad.

A week later and the lights will be turned off on his long and illustrious Test career after the day’s business, and the 2025 Six Nations, is done in Rome’s Stadio Olimpico. For O’Mahony, it will be the bookend on a stint that started in 2012.

No-one’s career makes for an unblemished print and you don’t have to read between too many lines to make out the lows. For Murray and Healy the most notable challenges were respective neck injuries that had them wondering if this was the last chapter.

O’Mahony? He fretted that his Test career was cursed from the off.

Selected on the bench by Declan Kidney for the Championship opener in 2012, he was ready to make his debut towards the end of the game against Wales in Dublin when Stephen Ferris went and earned a yellow card for a tip tackle on Ian Evans.

Not this time, youngster.

A week later and he was part of the squad that travelled to Paris for the game against France. The game that never was. A frozen pitch was the culprit this time. Annoying for everyone, pure torture for a 22-year old desperate to play for his country.

"We warmed up and it was cancelled and I said, 'Fuck it, I'm never going to get capped',” he laughed earlier this week. “And then we had a week off and luckily, yeah, the following week against Italy I got capped.” 

From there to here has been quite the journey. He has captained his club, his country and the British and Irish Lions. Played 112 times in green and 193 in red. Won two league titles with Munster, five Six Nations, two Grand Slams and four Triple Crowns with Ireland.

And played in three World Cups.

The obvious question is, why stop now?

O’Mahony started the last two Six Nations games for Ireland, against Scotland and Wales. He played all 80 minutes in Cardiff the last day and topped the tackling charts with 19 made across a difficult afternoon for his side.

Yes, he is 35 years of age now, but Ronan O’Gara wrote in Friday’s Irish Examiner about how he would be asking the Cork forward to humour him with a chat before he signs off if he was the incoming Munster coach Clayton McMillan.

He’d be mad not to.

O’Mahony explained himself this week that the litmus test when he sat down and thought about the idea of retirement was whether he was “capable of continuing to play for Ireland”. That’s obviously still the case but the dye looks to be cast anyway.

Not even a tour de force in the Principality Stadium has lodged any doubts.

“I think I'm at peace, yeah. If you'd said to me at five or six, or 10, or 17 or 18, or 25, that I'd be sitting here and still playing for Ireland at this level, playing with a squad like that out there, there isn't one of those versions of me that wouldn't have bitten your hand off for that and probably would have said, 'there's no chance that is going to happen'.

“So I consider myself hugely lucky. I have worked hard, do you know what I mean? I have worked hard, I've put a lot into my career, personally and in lots of other ways, but I know I've been very lucky and I think I can be at peace sitting here saying that I'm looking forward to the next few weeks but looking forward to....” He trails off at that point.

Very few can hang up their boots and walk into the next room with absolute certainty. Johnny Sexton thought he could when assuming a role in the private sector and all but swearing blind that coaching wasn’t the life for him.

That didn’t last long. The former out-half is still working with the Ardagh Group, but he is moonlighting with the Ireland senior setup as a part-time kicking coach, and O’Mahony doesn’t rule out a role on the sidelines in the years to come.

But not for now.

Priority number one when the season ends will be a long break. His love for gardening is well-flagged at this stage and there is a pristine man shed at home that is primed to see him a lot more when he steps off rugby’s hamster wheel.

“I'm not taking anything off the table but I'll take a break from rugby, whatever happens. The kids are starting to grow up a little bit and I've missed a huge amount of milestones for them, family occasions, all sorts of stuff I've missed.

“So I'm going to enjoy a few months off, make sure I get to all those things I should be at, enjoy the period afterwards.

“I'm sure there's going to be bumps on the road. As I said, I've known nothing else other than rugby. I've been very lucky but at the same time my focus has been very narrow so I'm going to take a break and open up the horizons a little bit.” 

He wasn’t of a mind to stroll down Memory Lane. There’s still a job of work to be done, starting with the visit to Dublin of France, and where would he start given the roll call of moments and achievements through the years?

The competitor in him has always sat there on the surface. In that granite stare, in the sharp tongue, and in the relentlessness of his actions. It’s the nature of people like this to interrogate the low points rather than luxuriate in the good.

The two league titles with Munster, separated by 12 years, aren’t to be sniffed at but he graduated to the senior ranks at a time when they were populated by two-time Heineken Cup winners and the inability to add to that legacy is simply a fact of life. And it was put to him that Ireland became something of a “sanctuary” from that at times.

“I look back on my club career as being an unsuccessful one, whatever way you look at it. I came into the club with a group of players who had won a lot with the club still involved. I wanted to emulate that and, whatever way you look at it, I didn’t.

“I captained the team for a long time, to very little avail unfortunately, and I’ll have to live with that. I can still live with the fact that I put a lot of effort in. It wasn’t for the lack of trying. I was very lucky with the people I’ve played with in that club, and the club itself. The amount that they looked after me and have given back to me and my family is huge.

“But, yeah, coming up here [to Ireland camp] was a bit of a sanctuary: it’s an interesting way to put it. It turned into a little bit of a club for me as well. A club away from a club. The way that relationships went, the friends that I have up here. When I first started playing for Ireland, it wasn’t the same feeling that it is now. It’s turned into a bit of a club here.” 

There is a nice irony to that: the one-club man who feels like he played for two.